Naturalistic Theory: An Overview

Naturalistic Theory (NT) is the theoretical framework underlying the Relational Being Project. It asks a deceptively simple question: How did human beings come to live so differently from the way our species lived for most of its existence?

NT begins with Relational Being (RB): a way of being fully and ontologically engaged with oneself, other living beings, the physical world, and the cosmos. For most of human history, hunter-gatherer peoples lived within dense networks of material, social, ecological, and symbolic relationships. NT examines the long historical processes through which Civilization progressively suppressed and reduced this relational way of being.

This history cannot be explained adequately by economics, politics, religion, psychology, or ideas considered separately. NT therefore uses an ontohistorical approach: it examines historical change in relation to changes in human being itself. Its concern is not simply what people believed at different moments in history, but how changing social and material conditions altered what people could experience, think, value, and become.

NT identifies a series of interacting processes through which this occurred. These include Direct Materialistic Reduction (DMR), Symbolically Mediated Reduction (SMR), changes in the human psyche, the emergence of Thought Regimes, the development of the Protestant Individual, and, eventually, the computational and algorithmic forms of reduction characteristic of the Necrological Era.

The argument is cumulative. Civilization did not transform human being in a single event, nor did one institution or ideology cause the transformation. Over roughly six thousand years, different forms of reduction built upon one another, increasingly separating people from the relationships through which human beings had previously experienced belonging, meaning, and equivalent value.

Naturalistic Theory attempts to make that long process visible.

For readers who want to explore the theory in greater depth, Naturalistic Theory: Core Concepts and Processes defines its principal concepts and shows how they relate to one another. The Ontological History Map then places those processes in historical sequence, providing a visual guide to NT's account of the development of Civilization and the progressive reduction of Relational Being.